Chaska turns Wi-Fi over to MSP

Community-wide wireless network proved troublesome for city government to handle.

David Pokorney, city administrator, left, and Noel Graczyk, administrative services director for Chaska, Minn., found a managed services provider to handle the city’s Wi-Fi network.

Government officials of Chaska, Minn., a suburban community located just outside the Twin Cities area, pride themselves on delivering innovative services to increase the quality of life of residents. For example, to ensure consistent levels of service and pricing, the city launched its own electric utility.

In 1998, city officials discovered that telecommunications providers in the area were not meeting the broadband data transmission needs of the schools in the community. To resolve the problem, city personnel created chaska.net, a wireless Internet service provider owned and operated by the city.

In 2004, with demand for broadband connectivity on the rise across the community of 7,500 homes and more than 18,000 residents, the city constructed a metro-scale, Wi-Fi network using a combination of Tropos Networks’ MetroMesh architecture, point-to-multipoint wireless backhaul connections and the city’s existing fiber network. Chaska.net initially used only wireless point-to-multipoint technology to provide connectivity. With this upgrade, Chaska became one of the first communities in the country to deploy a citywide Wi-Fi network, and the first to operate a municipally hosted ISP over a meshed wireless system.

As the number of chaska.net subscribers grew, Chaska officials realized that the city did not have the resources in place to fully support customers’ needs. Chaska employed only two to three temporary staff members to provide phone support to subscribers.

“We weren’t able to respond to calls as they were coming in. Most of the time, callers ended up leaving a voice mail message and the support staff would have to respond on a return-call basis,” says Noel Graczyk, administrative services director for the city. “We needed to improve the call center response so that customers could talk live to an operator and deal with problem resolution during the initial call.”

Making matters worse, in June of 2005, chaska.net began to experience significant problems with network performance. “There were areas of the city where the network was operating, but not to maximum efficiency,” says Graczyk. “As a result, customers were experiencing great difficulty in connecting to the network, sometimes resulting in hours of inaccessibility and lost efficiency.”

No analysis capabilities
More calls began to come in to the support center, putting an even greater strain on the small staff. “There were two sets of problems,” Graczyk says. “The first was related to the ongoing performance of the network. The second was related to customer-usage of the network, such as not knowing how to use e-mail or firewall protection. We didn’t have in place the tools we needed to track and analyze the calls that were coming in so we could see which calls were about old problems and which were new problems.”

As a result, customer usage issues bled into network performance issues, complicating the process of resolving problems for customers in a timely manner.

Chaska.net and Tropos made significant changes in the network to improve performance. “But the inherent problems of managing and monitoring the network on an on-going basis and providing efficient customer support were still there,” Graczyk says.

Largely because of the difficulties in providing effective customer support and a more reliable network, chaska.net lost a large number of its subscribers. City managers decided Chaska needed to hire a company that would take over support and provide continuous monitoring of the wireless network.

Officials began looking for a vendor in the fall of 2005 to manage contact center calls and responses, as well as network performance. They evaluated a number of vendors and determined that Siemens Communications could deliver a comprehensive managed-services offering with all of the elements they needed. Siemens’ venture capital investment in Tropos Networks in September 2005 also played a role in the decision to select it to provide its managed services service desk and network operations center (NOC) support of the chaska.net network.

Siemens Communications began supporting chaska.net in February, by monitoring performance of the meshed wireless network, as well as back-end network infrastructure that includes the city’s supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) center components. By monitoring and managing the SCADA components, the city has improved performance and minimized risk of failure of the systems that control the delivery of water through the municipality.

network now monitored
Siemens also took over the management and support of a separate wireless, point-to-multipoint network service–not based on Wi-Fi–the city had been offering to business customers for five years.

With Siemens HiPath managed services, “We know that any problems related to the network itself are being resolved,” says Graczyk. A network performance-management capability tracks network performance statistics that can be used to recommend enhancements as the chaska.net subscriber base and overall network is expanded.

“Siemens is not only monitoring the network 24/7–something we did not have the resources to do internally–but is also providing features that allow us to improve the performance of the network,” Graczyk says. “And the help desk constantly communicates with NOC services, allowing us to easily manage what were two separate problems.”

Subscribers now benefit from expanded hours of coverage offered from the service desk and quick resolutions to their problems. Chaska officials say the improvements in support, coupled with better network service, will lead to increases in the number of subscribers and the city’s revenue returns. At the time Siemens began supporting chaska.net, the network had about 2,300 residential and business subscribers. The city’s goal is to reach 4,000 subscribers within two years.

The expansion in subscriber base is expected to come from two sources: former customers who left because they were not satisfied with the quality of support services and new customers from the growing number of households in the community. City officials launched an intensive marketing campaign to promote the fact that network performance and customer support have been substantially improved. The program included direct mailings to households and local news coverage about the change in service.

“But word of mouth is the most effective marketing,” says City Administrator David Pokorney. “We’re hoping customers will see a difference in service and tell others about it.

“The overriding reason we created the partnership with Siemens was to take our Internet service to the next level,” says Pokorney. “We were providing good service before, but to provide great service we needed to improve network support and management.”